Santa's Village: a tiny magical North Pole world for Apple Vision Pro

[visuellstudios]

Hi all,

With the holidays coming up, I wanted to share a project I built entirely for Apple Vision Pro. Over the last three weeks, I created Santa’s Village, a fully immersive holiday micro-world that transforms your space into a living North Pole diorama. It just launched on the App Store, and since MacRumors is one of my favorite Apple communities, I thought some of you might enjoy taking a look.

The app is built 100 percent in RealityKit natively. No Unity, no Unreal, no cross-platform engine. Everything is handcrafted inside Apple’s visionOS tooling so the performance and spatial integration feel as seamless and “Apple-native” as possible.

The concept is simple. What if you could actually step inside a snow globe? Santa’s Village surrounds you with:

• shimmering volumetric snowfall
• playful animated elves
• a mischievous Yeti
• a festive little steam train with spatial audio
• warm glowing lanterns and cozy lighting
• Santa Claus brought to life in your space

It is not a game and not a passive video. It is meant to be a cozy, joyful, nostalgic environment you can return to throughout the season. My goal was to capture that classic holiday feeling and reimagine it through the lens of spatial computing.

If anyone here is exploring RealityKit, native visionOS development, or simply wants something festive to show friends and family, I would love your thoughts or feedback. I am also happy to answer any technical or creative questions about building natively for Vision Pro.

The app is called Santa’s Village: Holiday Magic and is available now on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro.

Happy holidays! ❄️🎄✨

 

[MacCheetah3]

Foremost, I want to say, this is (more of) what Vision Pro needs — well, actually everything. People creating because they want to. It’s clear you put passion and effort first. I’m not suggesting people never be compensated for effort. However, the “how can I make the most money?” attitude has made most content dreadful/pointless drudgery. I don’t mean adjusted or even compromised, it’s primarily deception and minimalist quality. I’ll leave it at that, hopefully, understood, as to not pull the subject far off course.

I do have some suggestions — apologies if I missed these features/functions:
• More gesture support
— Zoom in/out, rotate, move (e.g., the scene to eye level, closer, further). An example: ForeFlight Voyager
• Ability to restart the animation.
• Ability to interact with the environment, such as manually move the train, perhaps only after the animation stops.

Anyway… Again, well done.

 

[visuellstudios]

Foremost, I want to say, this is (more of) what Vision Pro needs — well, actually everything. People creating because they want to. It’s clear you put passion and effort first. I’m not suggesting people never be compensated for effort. However, the “how can I make the most money?” attitude has made most content dreadful/pointless drudgery. I don’t mean adjusted or even compromised, it’s primarily deception and minimalist quality. I’ll leave it at that, hopefully, understood, as to not pull the subject far off course.

I do have some suggestions — apologies if I missed these features/functions:
• More gesture support
— Zoom in/out, rotate, move (e.g., the scene to eye level, closer, further). An example: ForeFlight Voyager
• Ability to restart the animation.
• Ability to interact with the environment, such as manually move the train, perhaps only after the animation stops.

Anyway… Again, well done.

Thanks for the great feedback @MacCheetah3. Pushing an update this weekend that returns the button post "show" and gives the user the option to tap on the micro-animations to trigger then on their own.

Something that is really a hinderance (so far) in developing this world is a critical issue with compiled timelines. Every time I make a change to an existing timeline, or even an element that is involved in a timeline (like changing it's position, name, or other aspect), the timeline names that xcode looks for change... the app will not build due to looking for the compiled timelines from the previous version, and isnt made aware of the new timelines to look for.

This causes hours of cleaning, recaching, burning and rebuilding timelines. I've been looking for a better way to get around this issue, but no luck so far.

Anyway, thanks for the positive feedback. Keep it coming!